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Router Backdoor for When Your Upgrade Goes Awry

·388 words·2 mins
networking asus netgear nighthawk freshtomato r8000 backdoor telnet router dd-rwt
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Hopefully this helps someone else, but it’s mostly for my own edification for if when this issues happens again. This pertains to the Netgear Nighthawk X6 | Tri-Band WiFi Router | AC3200 (R8000) but I’m sure it apply to other (similar) routers. If you’ve ever used a Netgear router, you might not have been a big fan of it’s management UI. I wanted more control over my router so I opted to go for FreshTomato. After a few months, I decided to go through the upgrade process.

Grabbed the latest download for my router; went to the Administration Panel; selected the router firmware, and clicked the upgrade button; and waited. Everything was looking good! My laptop reconnected, the Plex server started streaming again, all was right with the world.

Until I tried to access 192.168.1.1…

My password no longer worked T_T. I tried the default admin:admin and admin:password, but to no avail. Well here’s how to fix it.

Note: It’s highly recommended that you use a machine that’s connected to the router with an ethernet cable.

Enable “backdoor” access for the router. Push and hold the Wifi On/Off button between 15~25 seconds. Took me about three tries to get it right.

You can now connect to the router on port 233

telnet 192.168.1.1 233
Note: If you’re unable to get this working, try using telnet on port 23 with the username root. Freshtomato, I think, has http_root enabled by default. If this is something you’ve disabled before then you may not be so lucky.

Use the nvram command to view the http_username and http_password.

# nvram show | grep -i 'http'
http_username=
http_password=redactedforobvsreasons

The http_username was blank! The hell!?

To set the value:

# nvram set http_username=admin

I recommend changing it to something other than admin, but this is usually the default.

With those values set, you should be good to go!

Note: I’ve noticed that the values are reset again after I router reboot. This greatly saddens me, but I’ve gotten pretty good now at setting it. Just keep that in mind.

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